Kim Koo

Kim Koo (29 August 1876-26 June 1949) was President of the Korean Provisional Government in 1927, succeeding Hong Jin and preceding Yi Dong-nyung, and from 1939 to 15 August 1948, succeeding Yi Dong-nyung and preceding Syngman Rhee. Koo was a prominent Korean independence leader, fighting against the Japanese and founding the Korea Independence Party. Kim was assassinated by an officer in Syngman Rhee's government in 1949; the two men had disagreed over holding separate elections in South Korea.

Biography
Kim Koo was born in Haeju, Joseon in 1876, and he applied for the civil service exam at the age of 16, but he failed. After that, he joined the Donghak academic movement of neo-Confucianism, and he took part in rebellions against the pro-Japanese government during the 1890s. In February 1896, he killed a Japanese merchant whom he had mistaken for a lieutenant in the Imperial Japanese Army, and he was tortured and sentenced to death before escaping from prison. In 1908, he joined the Korean independence movement, and he was again arrested and tortured after the 1910 assassination attempt on Governor-General Terauchi Masatake. In 1919, Kim went into voluntary exile in Shanghai, China after the March 1st Movement was suppressed, and he joined the Korean Provisional Government. Kim co-founded the Korean Patriotic Organization in 1931, and he also founded the Korea Independence Party. He committed the Provisional Government's army, the Korean Liberation Army, to the Allied side of World War II, and the war ended just days before the KLA planned to invade Korea, in August 1945. After the liberation, Kim initially supported the leadership of South Korean leader Syngman Rhee, but he opposed holding separate elections in the divided Korea, and his party boycotted the 1948 parliamentary election. On 26 June 1949, he was shot by the anti-communist army lieutenant Ahn Doo-hee, who burst into Kim's home as Kim read poetry, before proceeding to shoot him dead. Ahn claimed that he saw Kim as an agent of the Soviet Union, but, in 1992, he confessed that he was a part of a conspiracy led by Rhee's national security chief Kim Chang-ryong.